EN­SURE YOUR HOME IS SAFE, PO­LICE TELL RES­I­DENTS

Some uniden­ti­fied peo­ple broke into a flat at Ashir­wad CHS at Vashi, sec­tor 19 and stole gold jew­ellery worth Rs20 lakh from it in Fe­bru­ary last year.

One year down the line the po­lice have not been able to re­cover a sin­gle piece of stolen jew­ellery. How­ever, they claim to have ar­rested two per­sons in­volved in the crime. The so­ci­ety did not have any CCTV cam­eras in­stalled when the in­ci­dent took place. They had one se­cu­rity guard, but he too was sleep­ing then.

Sev­eral hous­ing so­ci­eties in Navi Mum­bai are lag­ging be­hind in se­cu­rity sys­tems and that is the rea­sons why more and more peo­ple are fall­ing prey to bur­glars in the city, the po­lice say.

Sources from the crime branch said bur­glar­ies in the city goes up ev­ery year dur­ing sum­mer va­ca­tion as many peo­ple go to their na­tive place. “In view of the in­creas­ing cases of bur­glar­ies, we are con­duct­ing meet­ings with the res­i­dents ev­ery Sun­day. Sev­eral meet­ing have al­ready been con­ducted in Vashi, Koparkhairane, Nerul, San­pada and Ra­bale so far,” said a crime branch of­fi­cial.

“Un­for­tu­nately, res­i­dents do not show in­ter­est in aware­ness drives con­ducted by the po­lice against house break- ins and other crimes. They hardly fol­low the pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sures men­tioned in the no­tices put up by cops in var­i­ous parts of the city. There will be a con­sid­er­able de­cline in bur­glary cases if they even read and fol­low the safety mea­sures men­tioned in such no­tices,” he added.

“Peo­ple spend lakhs of ru­pees on their houses and ve­hi­cles but when it comes to se­cur­ing them, they do not seem to have the bud­get. Fact is that it hardly costs much to get such se­cu­rity,” he said.

“Th­ese bur­glars are very pro­fes­sional. They get into the houses, take what­ever they want break­ing locks of cup­boards in­side in no time and get away. The en­tire op­er­a­tion takes them not even 10 min­utes. There­fore, we ap­peal to the city res­i­dents to co­op­er­ate with the po­lice in re­duc­ing crimes,” he said.